Guests at Omni luxury hotels will find small scented stickers on the front pages of their free copies of USA Today. A blackberry aroma will suggest that the guests start the day at their hotels with a cup of Starbucks coffee “paired with a fresh muffin.” The promotion, to be tested for at least six months, is being sponsored by Omni Hotels and Starbucks Coffee.
It is one of two ideas being explored by the Gannett Company, the parent of USA Today, in the increasingly popular realm of scented advertising. The other concept Gannett is testing is to let marketers add scents to the ads they run in the pages of USA Today. Another national newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, owned by Dow Jones & Company, is also looking into scenting its ad pages.
Scented selling, part of a trend known as sensory marketing, is gaining favor because it helps brands stand out in crowded, competitive categories.
After executives at Starbucks were invited to weigh in, the verdict was that “we all gravitated to the berry scent,” she added, because it “made you go ‘yum yum’ and had a very fresh scent.” (The smell of Starbucks coffee was deemed too difficult to duplicate.)
The stickers are composed of two layers and measure 2 inches long by 1 inch wide. They replace the single-ply stickers affixed to the front pages of USA Today, informing the guests the newspapers are courtesy of Omni Hotels. The chain distributes 10,000 to 13,000 copies a day of USA Today, Mr. Davidson estimated.
The stickers are of the “peel and sniff” variety in that the berry scents are not supposed to be released until the top layers are lifted. That is intended to minimize complaints from allergic — or berry-allergic — hotel guests.
Scented ads, like any sensory experience, have generated their share of protests. Ads in magazines featuring scent strips, for products like fragrances, draw the ire of readers who believe the smells are unpleasant or too powerful.
As a result, publishers like the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner, which owns magazines like InStyle, People and Real Simple, adopted a policy by which readers can request scent-free issues from customer service representatives.
And in December, the California Milk Processor Board ran afoul of scent-sensitive commuters when it asked that adhesive strips smelling like chocolate chip cookies be affixed to five bus shelters in San Francisco.
Gripes about the aroma from the ads, part of the “Got milk?” campaign, led the local Municipal Transportation Authority to order CBS Outdoor, which maintains the bus shelters, to remove the scent strips.
